1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to user interfaces in digital processing systems and more specifically to a method and apparatus for simplifying understanding of procedure dependencies in a form definition used in user interfaces.
2. Related Art
A form generally refers to a user interface provided to a user by virtue of displaying an image on a display screen. Forms generally provide a convenient mechanism by which information can be displayed to and data received from a user. The information displayed in a form can be received from various sources such as the same system on which the form is displayed, web servers, data servers, or any digital processing systems, in general. Similarly, the data received from a form can be sent to various systems for further processing and/or storing.
A form definition refers to data specifying one or more aspects of a form such as the content (including attributes such as color, font, text, etc.) of various portions of the image displayed (for the form), the manner in which such content can be generated, the manner in which a user may interact with various portions of the image, actions to be performed during the interaction, etc.
A procedure in a form definition contains a group of software instructions that is to be executed, and is identified by an identifier. The form definition may also specify the conditions (e.g., in response to a specific user action, events occurring associated with the form) under which the procedure is to be executed.
Procedures often contain software instructions that invoke/refer other procedures contained in a form definition. The invoking/referring procedure is termed as a caller procedure, the invoked/referred procedure is termed as a called procedure, and the caller procedure is said to depend on the called procedure.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.